This is how a trickle of realignment can quickly accelerate. Conservative Democrats and progressive Republicans are driven to switch parties by their party’s growing hardline ideological faction, which shrinks the area of overlap. Politicians respond in kind by catering their messages more to the hardliners, which causes more defections, and ideological plurality within the parties slowly morphs into ideological purity. In the terms of our proverb, conflict between “brothers” melted away as the parties increasingly became ideologically unified. With the “strangers” mostly gone and the
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